Castle has announced the launch of a subscription scheme for its C/C++ development suite. The scheme aims to fund future development of the compiler suite through annual subscriptions, or as Castle spin it: "This step aims to ensure that RISC OS developers see a continuous flow of improvements to the development suite, providing better code density and performance for RISC OS applications than ever before.

"In addition features introduced into ARM development tools in the embedded world over the last few years will now be brought to the RISC OS platform for the first time."

Spiffy. And the most incredible thing about this? The road map, sorry, the proposed road map. Castle have listed developments that they haven't released yet, which is pretty uncharacteristic of them, although expected for a rolling subscription system. An inline assembler, packed structure support and other updates are "due for immediate release". Also, an updated optimiser with support for instruction scheduling, further C99 support and other features are planned for some time later in 2004.

Is it worth writing home about these features? Useful these updates are, and although GCC has had a number of these abilities for a while now, the differences between the compilers are well documented. Certainly, it's welcoming to see Castle, for a change, express the direction of future product development ahead of release.

The thing I'm not entirely happy about is that you can only subscribe if you bought it at least 3 years ago, and you have to prove when you bought it - I can't remember when I bought my copy: don't they have records?

It's good to see Castle actually plan out future compiler developments for RISC OS 5 and beyond, and how people will pay for them. RISC OS users increasingly have to realise that future development depends on investment by the user base. Initiatives like this, just like Stuart Tyrrell's scheme for paid support for USB, provide the funding to ensure that development continues.

Developers may think that they are entitled to the whole thing for free....

The full text for point no. 1 is:
"To qualify for the subscription prices, purchasers will have to provide evidence that they have purchased a full copy of Castle's C/C++ development tools, within the last three years, when registering online for upgrades."

So I want to know what evidence will be suitable?
I doubt that I can pull out my receipt for the tools from the 2002 Guildford show. Will my serial number do?
--
I am trapped on a roof ... with an unstable human who drinks too much whiskey and who called me a smurf.
Angel - Underneath (Season 5, Episode 17)

Given that Castle only released the 32 bit tools 18 months ago, the three year restriction isn't going to matter for another year and a half though. As long as you can prove that you have a legitimate copy (i.e. you have the original CD and serial number) surely that will do.

Well, it's a nice idea, and I understand that Castle have to fund continued development of the tools.

I purchased the 32-bit tools, but I won't however bee subscribing to this. As Chris has mentioned, GCC already does pretty much all the improvements mentioned (some such as inline assembler for many years), and GCC 3.3 knows already quite a bit about XScale optimisations (and I'm now experimenting with having XScale tuning the default, which will increase performance on StrongARM too), not to mention the ongoing efforts to improve overall ARM performance on other ARM platforms, which are relevant.

The only notable exception remains modules[1], and the debugging features supported by DDT, and of course GCC not being the fastest of compilers.

[1]. Jeffrey Lee has an experimental version of LCC that claims to do modules.

With all this talk of C, I hope they've also fixed the niggle(s) I've had with ObjAsm.
--
I am trapped on a roof ... with an unstable human who drinks too much whiskey and who called me a smurf.
Angel - Underneath (Season 5, Episode 17)

I think it's just one niggle I've had (which affects OSLib 6.60 and later users), and that's the -I argument. It doesn't work like -I does for the C compiler.
I.e. Specifying -IOSlib: won't expand OSLib: the way that the C compiler does and ObjAsm won't then search OSLib: for the Hdr files I GET. To work around that you have to issue something like:
do objasm -I OSLib:
Note the 'do' and the space after -I. I don't like this inelegant solution and so I've stuck with OSLib 6.50 .
Note: OSLib 6.60+ has switched from absolute filenames to 'relative' ones for it's GETs.
--
/Some day Iíll go where/There ainít no rain or snow/Till then Iíll travel alone/
/And Iíll make my bed/With the stars above my head/And dream of a place called home/
Angel - Shells (Season 5, Episode 16)

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